Between Halloween and the MLS playoffs, I got significantly less done than I thought, but I just posted five more long reviews as well as my concrete, day-by-day plan to get my portion of the judging wrapped up by next weekend. All that is right here:

2010 Game Chef Playoffs will start on Sunday, Nov 7th and we can probably go ahead and say that anything you play that weekend counts as far as the playoffs are concerned. I'll try to post the official playoff rules in the middle of this week, perhaps on Thursday, which is typically my day off.

In case folks are interested, Dave M responded to my feedback with questions about how he could make his game better, so I offered to help him workshop the resolution mechanics (at the very least) over on Praxis. Right now, we're just at the early stages, digging into the mechanics trying to find where the actual resolution happens, but it should be really interesting and hopefully helpful for other folks to watch. Everything that we're doing, folks should be able to do with their own games -- stripping away everything and then building your mechanics back up -- which is really helpful to do when you're trying to go from an alpha draft to something that you're going to playtest extensively (a beta draft, basically).

Thank you, Jonathan! The feedback is great, really. I can honestly tell you my heart pounded faster when I read your thoughts on the rules than on the Finalist bit. You've made some excellent points and pointed out issues I wanted to work on (no mechanic for endgame, no clear explanation on wounds etc.), but didn't, all in a very clear way. I hope the 1.2 version will be better. Again, thank you. This kind of criticism is priceless.

Jonathan: I agree with Tamara - your feedback has been constructive and very useful, whether we were finalists or not.

Thank you very much - and thanks in general for the enormous amount of work you've put in, writing solid reviews for 59 games. Participating in Game Chef has been an excellent experience (despite the delays), and you deserve your share of the credit.